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Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is a retired
Dartmouth Dartmouth may refer to: Places * Dartmouth, Devon, England ** Dartmouth Harbour * Dartmouth, Massachusetts, United States * Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada * Dartmouth, Victoria, Australia Institutions * Dartmouth College, Ivy League university i ...
professor of
mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
and
computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
, who along with his colleague
John G. Kemeny John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946), Hungarian-born Americans, American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC ...
set in motion the then revolutionary concept of making computers as freely available to college students as library books were, by implementing the concept of
time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...
at
Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...
. In his mission to allow non-expert users to interact with the computer, he co-developed the
BASIC programming language BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. Dartmouth BASIC, The original version was created by John ...
(Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and the
Dartmouth Time Sharing System The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) is a discontinued operating system first developed at Dartmouth College between 1963 and 1964. It was the first successful large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented, and was also the system for wh ...
during 1963 to 1964. A native of
Oak Park, Illinois Oak Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago. It is the 29th-most populous municipality in Illinois with a population of 54,583 as of the 2020 U.S. Census estimate. Oak Park was first settled in 1835 and later incorporated in ...
, United States, Kurtz graduated from Knox College in 1950, and was awarded a
Ph.D. degree A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
from
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
in 1956, where his advisor was
John Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distributi ...
, and joined the Mathematics Department of Dartmouth College that same year, where he taught statistics and numerical analysis. In 1983, Kurtz and Kemeny co-founded a company called True BASIC, Inc. to market
True BASIC True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from Dartmouth BASIC—the original BASIC. Both were created by college professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. History True BASIC traces its history to an offsh ...
, an updated version of the language. Kurtz has also served as Council Chairman and Trustee of EDUCOM, as well as Trustee and Chairman of NERComP, and on the Pierce Panel of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. Kurtz also served on the steering committees for the CONDUIT project and the CCUC conferences on instructional computing. In 1974, the
American Federation of Information Processing Societies The American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) was an umbrella organization of professional societies established on May 10, 1961, and dissolved in 1990. Its mission was to advance knowledge in the field of information science, ...
gave an award to Kurtz and Kemeny at the
National Computer Conference The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield ...
for their work on BASIC and time-sharing. In 1991, the
Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...
honored Kurtz with the
IEEE Computer Pioneer Award The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. T ...
, and in 1994, he was inducted as a
Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...
of the
Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
.


Early life and education

In 1951, Kurtz' first experience with computing came at the Summer Session of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at
University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
. His interests have included
numerical analysis Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic computation, symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of ...
,
statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...
, and
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
ever since. He graduated in 1950 when he obtained his bachelor's degree majoring in mathematics and in 1956, at the age of 28, he went on to acquire his
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
from
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
. His thesis was on a problem of multiple comparisons in mathematical statistics. Kurtz composed his first computer program in 1951 while working with computers at UCLA in the institute of numerical analysis. He performed this feat just after finishing grad school and one year into his tuition at Princeton University.


Dartmouth

In 1963 to 1964, Kurtz and Kemeny developed the first version of the
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) is a discontinued operating system first developed at Dartmouth College between 1963 and 1964. It was the first successful large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented, and was also the system for wh ...
, a
time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...
system for university use, and the
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
language. From 1966 to 1975, Kurtz served as Director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth, and from 1975 to 1978, Director of the Office of Academic Computing. From 1980 to 1988 Kurtz was Director of the Computer and Information Systems program at Dartmouth, a ground-breaking multidisciplinary graduate program to develop
information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...
(IS) leaders for industry. Subsequently, Kurtz returned to teaching full-time as a Professor of Mathematics, with an emphasis on statistics and computer science.


BASIC

As part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, Kemeny and Kurtz created the BASIC programming language. The very first BASIC program ran on May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m., and neither Kemeny nor Kurtz thought of this as a start to something grand. They merely hoped it would help students learn something about the computers they were using. The pair made certain that their invention was immediately dispersed to the public and made no real money from it. Dartmouth College copyrighted BASIC; however it made BASIC available and free to anyone wanting to use it. The name for the language originated from Kurtz's wish to have a simple acronym that meant something as well. Kurtz states that, “We wanted a word that was simple but not simple-minded, and BASIC was that one.”Robert Slater, 1987. Portraits in silicone., MIT Press BASIC along with the books published on it earned a lot of positive feedback, for example: “This second edition of Basic Programming gives a thorough description of BASIC, which is useful not only for the beginner, but also for the more experienced programmer.”; “ My overall evaluation of BASIC programming is that it is ideal for the individual who wishes to program with a minimum of effort and of equal value for group or classroom instruction.” The theme that BASIC was for the average computer user is stressed by Kurtz. In an open letter he reiterates upon past statements that BASIC was invented to give students a simple programming language that was easy to learn, as all the current languages of the time were dedicated to professionals. He then went on to say that BASIC was for people who did not want to dedicate their lives to programming. The repetition of this idea by Kurtz accentuates that even through all of his success the language he wrote would remain implemented for the masses and not just specialists. BASIC standards were created in the 1980s for the
ECMA Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...
, and ANSI with their versions being released in 1986 and 1987 respectively. BASIC popularity skyrocketed in 1975 after a pair of youngsters in a Harvard dormitory,
Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
and
Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which h ...
, created a version of BASIC that was viable on one of the earliest personal computers. Gates and Allen's version became the most prominent iterations of BASIC. His work on BASIC was recognized by th
IEEE
as part of their milestone program which marks historic places for human innovation from around the world. Places honored include Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he invented the light bulb and phonograph, and the hilltop outside Bologna, Italy where Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio transmission. Th
plaque
was placed on 22 February 2021.


Influence

The road to BASIC itself was a long one. Kemeny and Kurtz had forged DARSIMCO – Dartmouth Simplified Code – Dartmouth's inaugural attempt at making a computing language in 1956; however DARSIMCO soon became obsolete when the language FORTRAN manifested itself. In 1962 Kemeny and a Dartmouth undergraduate, Sidney Marshall, created the language DOPE, ''Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment'', which was a direct predecessor of BASIC. DOPE itself was little used, and Kurtz preferred trying to implement successful languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL. Kurtz's experience with
Dartmouth ALGOL 30 Dartmouth ALGOL 30 was a 1960s-era implementation, first of the ALGOL 58 programming language and then of ALGOL 60. It is named after the computer on which it ran: a Librascope General Precision (LGP-30) desk-size computer acquired by Dartmouth C ...
for the
LGP-30 The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, was an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California (a division of General Precision Inc.), and so ...
convinced him that devising subsets of these languages was not quite practical, and this led him to adopt Kemeny's notion of creating a new language entirely.


Critics

Although BASIC was widely regarded as a success, many computing professionals thought it was a poor choice for larger and more complicated programs. Larger programs became confusing and messy when they used the “GO TO” statement to jump from one line of a program to another. A further criticism of the original language was that it was unstructured, which made it difficult to split programs into separate parts to improve readability. BASIC not being structured also hindered the ability to debug and modify parts of the code, and this limited its use by larger companies. Hence it largely remained a language used for only smaller programs.


True BASIC

In 1983, in response to a proliferation of "Street BASICs," a group of graduating Dartmouth students persuaded Kemeny and Kurtz to offer the Dartmouth version of the language as a commercial product. The first offering of their company, True Basic, Inc., was based on Dartmouth BASIC 7, which featured modern programming constructs such as “IF..THEN..ELSE, DO..LOOP and EXIT DO”. The company described its product as “Simple. Elegant. Powerful. True BASIC.“ Upon Kemeny's advice, True BASIC was not limited to a single OS or computer system. “Today versions of True BASIC are available for
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...
,
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
,
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
,
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
, and
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
systems”. When Kurtz retired from Dartmouth College in 1993, he continued to develop and maintain True Basic.


See also

* New Hampshire Historical Marker No. 261: BASIC: The First User-Friendly Computer Programming Language


References


External links


Alumni PageAbout his 1991 Computer Pioneer Award
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kurtz, Thomas E 1928 births American computer scientists BASIC programming language Dartmouth College faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Knox College (Illinois) alumni Living people Princeton University alumni Programming language designers